Teen's Origami Experiments Could Transform How We Build Disaster Shelters

Paper, Dumbbells, and a Big Idea

The apparatus for one of the year's most celebrated student experiments was humble: paper and gym equipment. Miles Wu, 14, of New York City, spent his project folding the same origami pattern over and over — 54 systematic variations of it — and then crushing his own handiwork, loading dumbbells onto each folded structure until it gave way and writing down the number. The result? A discovery that stunned even him.

Sitting in his family's living room in New York City, Miles was astonished to find that a simple piece of paper, folded into a Miura-ori origami pattern, could hold 10,000 times its own weight. "I calculated that to be the equivalent of a New York City taxi cab holding over 4,000 elephants," he said. Working through a meticulous series of experiments that spanned more than 250 hours, the Hunter College High School ninth-grader spent his time folding, measuring, and crushing his own paper creations.

The Fold With a History

Wu was especially intrigued by the Miura-ori fold, named after its inventor, the Japanese astrophysicist Koryo Miura. It is a geometric pattern that packs flat and unfolds in one smooth motion. The pattern of creases and angles, which can be manipulated to create many variations, "folds this really large sheet of paper into a really flat, compact shape," Wu explained — a property that immediately suggested real-world usefulness.

Wu believed "smaller, less acutely angled panels made of heavier material would yield a greater strength-to-weight ratio." By the end of his trials, his hypothesis was partially correct. While small and less acutely angled panels showed a better strength-to-weight ratio, Wu found that copy paper — not heavier materials — had the strongest strength-to-weight ratio. Science has a way of humbling even its most careful practitioners, and this was one of those satisfying surprises.

Why Disaster Shelters Need This

It was during the wildfires in Southern California and Hurricane Helene when Wu familiarized himself with deployable disaster shelters that he realized he might use origami to build a better one. The connection between a centuries-old paper-folding art and emergency housing might seem like a leap — but the geometry makes it logical.

The application Miles has named is the one the geometry begs for: strong, lightweight shelters that ship flat and deploy fast in disaster zones. Emergency shelter is a logistics problem before it is a housing problem — the structures are needed by the thousand, immediately, at the end of broken supply chains — and a Miura-based building would fly as a dense stack and open like a map, its strength coming from crease geometry rather than heavy framing.

A Prize and a Frontier

Last October, that stack of creased paper and weights won Miles the $25,000 top prize at the Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challenge, the national middle-school competition run by Society for Science — the junior sibling of the storied Science Talent Search. It is the biggest prize available to a middle-school scientist in the United States.

His plans put him in step with a genuine research frontier: origami engineering is currently one of the busiest corners of structural design, from NASA solar arrays to foldable bridges. "One thing I really want to look into is prototyping one of these Miura-ori to create a real emergency shelter that could be used in real-life situations and actually help people," Wu said. For a teenager working with paper and gym weights in his living room, that ambition no longer sounds far-fetched at all.